HPE announced today that it has upgraded its edge platform to help carriers transition to 5G services.
HPE's Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge System was designed to help communications service providers (CSPs) process data intensive, low-latency services directly at the edge of networks. In addition to 5G, HPE said the EL8000 was also ideal for provisioning smart cities, artificial intelligence, video analytics and media delivery.
HPE also announced that it was partnering with Samsung and Tech Mahindra to help communications service providers with their 5G transitions. The partnership is working on a joint edge-to-core vRAN commercial solution based on Samsung’s radio network technologies and system integration services, and the HPE Edgeline EL8000.
While islands of 5G deployments are taking place this year, 5G won't really start to ramp up until 2020 or later. In order to help grease the migration to 5G, CSPs are starting to tap into multiaccess edge computing (MEC) software, which uses the 4G LTE infrastructure to delivery some of the benefits of 5G. On that note, HPE is partnering with Tech Mahindra, which develops in MEC software, to create MEC solutions.
The Edgeline EL8000 has a compact "ruggerized" form factor in order to provision data and services in remote cell site locations. It comes with a Xeon Scalable Processors, which cut down on power consumption while reducing latency, and up to 1.5 terabytes of memory and 16 terabytes of storage.
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HPE said that system components can be combined, scaled and hot-swapped to meet changing demands, supporting, among others, NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, FPGAs from Intel and Xilinx, NICS from Intel and Mellanox.
“CSPs have come a long way in virtualizing their networks. As this continues, the distribution of converged communications and compute capacity throughout the network will accelerate lower costs and improve service,” said HPE's Dr. Tom Bradicich, vice president and general manager, converged servers, edge and IoT systems, in a prepared statement. “The HPE Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge System delivers the capabilities of closed proprietary systems and more, but on an open-standards platform, combined with proven data-center class IT.”
Last summer HPE said it would spend $4 billion over the next four years on the development of edge products and services. The investment will target research and development of "intelligent" edge services across various technology domains such as security, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and edge computing.
The Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge System will be globally available in June.